Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [37]
When the golf season ended, John got a “real” job, working as a helper on a truck for Gaburo’s Laundry at the corner of Farrand Avenue in Raritan, delivering clean clothes, a job he actually held on to for a year before being canned for sleeping on the job. According to Doorly, future Raritan mayor Steve Del Rocco, who knew Basilone, called him “a happy go lucky . . . [who] enjoyed everything he did.”
But John was restless. And with his lack of education and difficulty with books, in a down economy, at some point he must have concluded that going into the Army (a private received twenty-one dollars a month; a uniform; a pair of stout, hard-soled shoes; and three squares a day) might be a way of escaping depressed and jobless Raritan. Not yet eighteen, he needed parental approval, and that took considerable convincing. According to sister Phyllis, their father, Salvatore, “tried to reason with him. ‘Johnny, you’re crazy. You’re only a kid. There’s no war, why do you want to join the Army?’” Raritan was a small town, and John’s mother was reluctant to see her boy leave home and go out into a very large and unknown world. He argued, though without any evidence, “I’ll find my career in the Army.”
Wrote Phyllis, “He explained to papa that with the Depression all about us, it was almost impossible to get a job. Army life might be just what he was looking for, he said. Then again, when his enlistment ran out, conditions might be better.” On that point, Salvatore, an employed tailor but very well aware of the lousy job market, who’d been pressuring John to start a career in something, anything, reluctantly had to agree with his son. Doorly writes that the senior Basilones may have concluded the military could be “a good match” for a strong, active, out-of-doors kid like their son.
We know to the day the date on which John would later join the Marine Corps, but there is a debate on when, even in what year, he earlier joined the prewar U.S. Army in the mid-1930s. Doorly believes John joined up in June 1934. Cutter tells me that by his reckoning, John enlisted “about three months before he turned eighteen [on November 4], which would have been August of ’34. I know his parents had to sign on.” His Marine Corps records insist he had joined the Army early in 1936. His 1935 Army service in the Philippines, thoroughly documented, indicates the Marine data is incorrect. But the military records that might solve this small and perhaps unimportant question were destroyed by fire in 1973 at the Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, where the archives were held. According to Marine historian Bob Aquilina, Marine and U.S. Navy records went untouched in the fire but Army records of the time were burned.
There may have been additional arguments within the family about John’s enlistment, some fits and starts along the way, since with the requisite records missing, some contradictory evidence suggests that John didn’t actually enlist until he was nineteen. The Marine Corps, which apparently keeps files on just about everything, even the other military services, reports on John’s military service record that he joined the Army on February 5, 1936, and served on active duty with consistently excellent fitness reports until being discharged back into civilian life and the U.S. Army Reserve on September 8, 1939. Since there is reasonable proof that as a young soldier still on his first enlistment John arrived in the Philippines in March 1935 to start a two-year overseas tour of duty, we can conclude that, at least this once, the Marine Corps got it wrong.
All we get is a fanciful line or two supposedly from “Johnny” to Phyllis Basilone as he left home for the Army. She describes his getting on the train at Raritan for Newark and then traveling under the Hudson River into Manhattan, no date given. “Well, Sis, I’m on my way. I wonder